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Oh my, it’s late, but better late than never This is the postmortem for the game Architect Of Terror I made in three days for the Ludum Dare 33. Note: this postmortem contains spoilers. You should play it before if you didn’t do yet, it’s an unusual (and maybe disturbing) experience!

– This was a challenging Ludum Dare experience because I had never made a game with Unity before. Before the Ludum Dare , I had only followed the 3 first Unity tutorials (Roll a ball, Space shooter and Survival) and had played with it one or two hours. And yet I shipped a working game in time, which was roughly like I wanted. I had read before that one should not start Ludum Dare without knowing its tools… I’d reply that it depends! (in the other hand I had more than 7 years of professional experience in development, so C# was not a difficult step for me).

– I did a game in a weekend but I also did other stuff as well – partly because my girlfriend would have been unhappy to see me hooked on the computer the whole time. I still found maybe less than 15 hours of working on it, which is not that much for a Jam, and yet, like I said, I shipped a working game in time, which was roughly like I wanted.

– Unity physics engine did a really good job. Sometimes unexpected bugs becames features, like for example red people “shaking” of excitement when you talk to them on the tribune. Sometimes simple tricks gave a really good impression, like red people following a yellow victim, giving the impression to push or even lift it.

– The game theme and main idea went quite quickly, and the game ideas went progressively during development. I though as first to make a more explicit reference to Nazism, but my girlfriend suggested to change this, and I think it’s a good idea because it makes the game more universal.

– In the end, the ratings results show an improvement compared to my previous (first) ludum dare game, yay!

What went wrong:

– Nothing really important. I got some trouble in the end because I think the source code was going a little bit confusing and Unity physics engine wasn’t exactly always behaving like I was expecting, and as such I took some time in displacing source code functions and doing trial-and-error tests. I was also not really sure about things like “do you have to go back to the tribune to activate the prison” or “how many blue people do you have to convince to activate bullying mode”, etc.

– I didn’t get enough time to add either music or sound. But that may have been complicated anyway to find something fitting the game.

– After the Jam, I didn’t get enough time to test that many games, or didn’t put enough time in it, to be honest. As a result my Coolness score is clearly below the rest.

How to continue the game:

I’m not sure about this, I could of course add some music or sound. But anyway I don’t know, because of the somewhat sensible theme of the game, I’m not sure it would be fitted for commercialization anyway (maybe it has to remain free, to show people how manipulation and terror may gain ground).

Hello everyone, greetings from Paris! Time has come to do my “post-mortem” article about my first Ludum Dare experience Check out my game (nb: it’s a 2-players game only)

Day one – aka “What went right … too right”

In France, the theme was given at 3am. I woke up at 8, and tried to decide what to do. The concept came rather quickly, and as soon as I found it, the implementation, the ideas, and the graphics came fast, without much hesitation, less hesitation actually than for my previous games; I had lots of C++ classes to implement, but I was coding fast, and I was knowing my tools, since I was using a C++ engine I had written myself over these last years (even if I had to do some bugfixes on this engine on the middle of the jam).

A major part of the game was implemented at the end of day one (There was just no sound/music, nor bonuses, and the cannon could not be hit by fire). My girlfriend and I tested quickly and it seemed fun, and working without known bugs.

Day two – aka “What went wrong”

At the beginning of day two, I woke up early after sleeping less than I usually do, took a coffee without eating first (what I usually don’t do) and immediately started coding.
My adorable girlfriend made some food for me, and I then started eating while coding. I started feeling sick. At first I stupidly suspected something in the food, but it was me:
I coded too fast (I think?) the whole day before and I was way way more tense and exhausted that I though.

I took a large part of the day off, doing shopping and going to the cinema watching Fast And Furious. I came back on the jam on the end of afternoon, when I felt way more rested. I added some features like sound. I discovered that there was a day three, because I didn’t had understood yet the distinction between jam and compo, silly me.

Day three

The day three I found a music for the game and implemented a way to fit the game to the size of the screen/window, for any resolution. It was a low level OpenGL and DirectX code that I implemented also as a feature for my personal engine (the Loving Cube Engine), so it took me a large part of the day.

So guys…

… take care of your health! Stress in your friend but also your enemy. Know your limits and take some breaks, even if you love coding like me.
[Edit: It has been confirmed that there was something wrong in the food, still, so that wasn’t only me haha]

What’s next?

I want to work on a new version of the game, but with way more features and complexity. Maybe another theme, but the same idea.

Big Bertha vs alien robots! got a bugfix! You might not have experienced it, but there was a small bug which could possibly have done weird things with the game speed when the framerate was lower than 60. You can check out the fixed version (To guarantee that no feature was added, you can even still check out the previous version).

Also, I did not do a post for this, but since Thursday a Windows 8 Store version of my game is now available! It’s one of the very rare Ludum Dare games on the Windows Store (The third one ever published, AFAIK). It does not use the same low-level rendering mechanism (DirectX instead of OpenGL), but the high-level code (and thus the game features) are strictly the same.

Don’t forget you need a friend to test it because it’s an exclusively 2-players cooperative game … Due to popular demand, I’ll try to implement a single-player mode

(I also still have my “post mortem” article to write, I was traveling so I did not get the time, but I think I’ll do it soon!)